Monday, November 22, 2010

Mailbox Monday - Witchgrass and The Storm Before Atlanta

***New novel lampoons Drug War. WITCHGRASS: a pipe dream, a novel by Dave Wilkinson portrays shattered lives and conflicted families as a New England town splits apart. What if a Vietnam helicopter suddenly landed in your back yard? The town of New Salem, Maine faces an invasion of military operations, secret spies and child-parent betrayal that sets a peaceful rural county spinning. Carolyn Chute, author of best-selling The Beans of Egypt, Maine, "cry-laughed and laugh-cried through a book more important than most of what they give kids to read in school." Witchgrass: a pipe dream sweeps the reader into a quiet world turned upside down by the War on Drugs. An afternoon invasion becomes a multi-faceted dramedy as marijuana-hunting helicopters cause confusion and panic one summer during the early 1990s. School children, sheriffs, professors and prosecutors play their parts in a story about one of America's major social issues. Emotions boil in the culture clash over cannabis, a matter which divides parent from child, employee from company, husband from wife. As the story comes to its unexpected and riotous climax, Maine in the Bush One era becomes a positive vision of future enlightenment. In its non-judgmental portrayal of cannabis users, this novel brightens the image of much-maligned pot smokers.

***At a time when most people have grown weary of the war between the states, two young children are desperate to find their way to the battlefields. Jeremy DeGroot wants nothing more than to join a troop as a drummer boy. For Dulcie, a runaway slave, freedom means she must head directly toward the fighting in the hopes that she'll become "contraband," that is, property of the Union troops. Both Jeremy and Dulcie find a place with the 107th New York Volunteer Regiment and even start to forge a friendship. But all that is threatened when they keep crossing paths with the mysterious Charlie, a young Confederate soldier, who may look like the enemy but feels more like a friend.